Soaring Ever Higher
by rayrae118
Summary: Whatever it Takes series. It was a tradition. A weird Stark family tradition. Every night at dinner, Morgan had her own place setting. Pepper and Tony had their own plates. And so did Steve. A single plate sat empty next to Morgan night after night. Snapshot through the years. Even though Steve is no longer physically around, that doesn't mean he's not still a part of their family.


**This is the next one-shot in the Whatever it Takes series. If you haven't read the others, this won't make any sense to you!**

**A few notes: The lake house – I did a quick Google search, and apparently you can actually rent the lake house from Endgame on AirBnB. The house itself is in Georgia, not sure where it was supposed to be in the movie, but we're making it in Georgia here.**

**Concerning ages of the kids – I used Age of Ultron as a reference, and the movie came out in 2015, I figure Laura was at least six months pregnant (though I'm not great at judging those things so I could be very off). So I estimated that Nate was born in 2015, making him three when they were all dusted. When he reappears in this story it's been about a year and a half since the end of Endgame, making him approximately four, maybe almost five when you take out the years he was gone. Morgan was born in 2019, making her four (almost five) at the end of Endgame. **

**Lila and Cooper are harder to estimate. Based on the heights in AoU, it looks like Cooper is older, maybe 10 or so, where Lila looks like she could be 6 or 7, if that. However, at the beginning of Endgame it looks like Lila is around 15. But if AoU takes place around 2015 (based on when the movie comes out), and the end of Infinity War/when she gets dusted is 2018, she should only be three years older… so we're going to fudge some things for the purposes of this story: I'm making Lila the older one because she looks like she's the oldest in Endgame. I'm going to say she was 10/11 in AoU, and 14 in Endgame when she got dusted. For Cooper, I'm going to say he was 8 in Aou and 11 in Endgame.**

It started with an innocent question. _Where's Uncle Steve going to sit? _A tearful four-year-old who didn't want to understand that he was gone forever

And her parents were struggling to deal with the loss just as much as their daughter, so they didn't try to argue.

It soon became a tradition. Every night at dinner, Morgan had her own place setting. Pepper and Tony had their own plates. If they had any guests that night – and Happy, Rhodey, and Bucky were all frequent visitors – they each got their own.

And so did Steve. A single plate, framed by fork and knife, sat empty next to Morgan night after night.

The Stark family had abandoned the lake house for more than a nice getaway from time to time, moving back to Manhattan before Morgan's fifth birthday. Many weekends were spent at the new Avengers Compound in rural Pennsylvania, far enough away from civilization to be able to hide any superhero-sized accidents (or the small chemical reaction from one weekend where Tony and Bruce got a little carried away with their experiments – they maintained that no one had been in any danger, but they still had to rebuild the east wing of the Compound and deal with the Wrath of Pepper – Tony sometimes thought he should totally get that trademarked, considering how many times he had provoked that specific look from the woman, but wisely shelved the idea when he considered what else she might do to him if she found out.

No matter what dinner table they sat at though – whether it was on the top levels of Stark Tower in Manhattan (name changed back to its original after the Accords and the Avengers split, and never corrected), the spacious dining room of the Avengers Compound in Pennsylvania, or the cozy eat-in kitchen at the lake house in Georgia – there was always that empty place.

Any guests the Starks had knew better than to ask – and considering most of them knew exactly why the family had developed this odd quirk in the first place, there wasn't much reason to question it anyway.

The reasons changed throughout the years – at first it was Morgan waiting for her uncle to come home, but as she grew older it became more about remembering Steve, keeping him close and making sure that even in death he knew he was still a part of their family.

And for Tony, he never wanted to forget what they had all lost, just so that he could come home. It bothered him, sometimes, that the world would never know the loss of Steve Rogers. Barnes was doing a great job as Captain America, just like they had all asked. But it wasn't the same, and Tony missed Steve's steady calm and unwavering presence every second of every day.

He missed the years they had had in between snaps – sure, it had sucked on the grand scale, but individually, he considered those to be the years where he and Steve truly went from friends to brothers. The years where they became family, not just because they had been thrust together by a pirate in a trench coat to save New York from its first brush with outer space, but because they truly wanted each other to stick around. It wasn't so much about regrouping whenever the world was in danger, but dropping by unexpectedly for dinner, family day trips to the zoo and basking in Morgan's newfound determination to be a penguin when she grew up. Tony tried to explain the logistics of that one to the three-year-old, but Steve had just laughed it off and bought the girl a stuffed penguin from the gift shop on their way out – years later, and she still slept with that stuffed animal every night.

It had only been for five years, but it had felt like a completely different lifetime for Tony. He didn't want to forget that. But as the months went by, Tony felt more and more like he was grasping at straws, struggling not to let the moments slip away.

That empty place setting grounded him. They never even thought about it anymore, pulling out the extra plate routinely every night as they set the table.

Night after night, and Tony didn't even realize how ingrained it was into their routine until the first time the Bartons all visited the Compound for the weekend.

Clint had been coming by with more frequency as the weeks passed. He enjoyed retired life, but just like Tony and Bucky, he had never felt completely comfortable leaving it all behind. He had consoled himself for a few years with teaching his kids how to shoot and driving Laura nuts by renovating the entire farmhouse, but it just wasn't the same. He had lasted approximately six months after Tony's return and just five weeks after the billionaire announced the new Avengers Compound open and ready for inhabitants before he was tagging along with Wanda, who had only planned on staying with the Bartons for a short while, but it had turned into months and now she was loathe to ever leave. Laura accepted her unconditionally into the family, and Lila loved having another girl around and had latched onto the Scarlet Witch as an older sister almost immediately.

Wanda had traveled out to the Compound every weekend since it had been retrofitted from the old storage facility it used to be. Bucky seemed to be the only person living in the Compound full time, but he never had time to feel lonely since the others made it a point to stop by as much as possible. Thanks to Tony and Stark Industries, they all had access to super-fast quinjets and even Scott and Hope could make the trip from California in just a couple hours. Bruce was using the Compound as a home base, but he made frequent trips out that could last days at a time. Sam was talking about moving out to Pennsylvania full time soon, so that he could be there with Bucky and there were VA's everywhere that could always use some help – and thanks to Tony's generosity he didn't even need to worry about whether or not they paid – but he hadn't quite worked out how to tell his parents yet; they still panicked if he didn't come over for dinner two nights in a row.

Weekends were when they really did all their training. It wasn't uncommon to see some superhero version of capture the flag or tag or hide and go seek taking place on the Compound's spacious grounds on a Saturday morning, or an overly crowded living room hosting Avengers movie nights that evening. Most of them tried to come out every weekend, and only rarely did any of them miss more than one weekend a month. They had a new team to train, and they needed to understand each other's moves just as easily as the original Avengers had come to do all those years ago.

Every now and then some of the group would bring a tagalong. Scott brought Cassie whenever the teenager was free – which was far more often than he had any right to expect, but she had missed her dad. Pepper and Morgan joined Tony at the Compound at least two weekends a month, often more, and Sam had even brought his sister out to meet everyone. Peter's 'Guy in the Chair' Ned tagged along as often as Peter let him, and the teenaged superhero even started bringing MJ with him after a couple months, now that they were officially dating and he had told her about his alter ego (not that he had apparently needed to say anything, she had known since he ditched their team at the decathlon in DC and then Spider-Man had saved them at the Washington Monument years earlier).

Clint was far less eager to reintroduce his family to the hero side of his life – they had met the Avengers years ago during the whole Ultron mess, but he had been careful to keep them as separate as possible other than that. Case in point, Tony knew about them and then inadvertently told everyone on the Raft and by extension, Ross. Clint had kept them off the radar for years, and because of the fucking Accords and Tony's guilt complex, Clint had been forced to put his address and relations on that stupid Registry. Nothing was one hundred percent secure, especially not an electronic list that could tell anyone the names and locations of every mutant or enhanced individual in the world – and they had proved him right laughingly quickly. It had only been a matter of months before that 'humans first' terrorist group the Watchdogs got a hold of the list and start picking off the people on it.

So yeah, Clint was very reticent to re-introduce his family to that world. But Laura knew that no matter how much she wanted her husband to fully retire, it wasn't in his nature to sit back and let others handle the problem, so she better just suck it up and get on board with embracing the whole extended superhero family. So she pestered him and threatened him until almost a year after he had first started joining Wanda on her weekend trips, he finally agreed to let the rest of them come.

Lila and Cooper loved joining the Avengers in capture the flag while Laura followed Pepper inside with four-year-old Nate, trusting that the heroes wouldn't harm the older kids, and both of them were thrilled to practice their shooting skills in a more realistic setting than shooting at a nonmoving target in their backyard.

What followed was an exhausting day for heroes, before they all regrouped later that evening for dinner and a movie. Takeout for the evening was Chinese – Laura had offered to cook but Pepper assured her that it was just as much a tradition as the movie night. Once a week, they all gathered together, and the winning team would yell at each other for ten minutes over which cuisine they would order for dinner and which movie they would choose to watch that night. Those were the rules: winning team got to pick the food and the movie.

(At least, that's the way it was supposed to work. If Tony was on the winning team more often than not whatever decision was made would be usurped by Morgan declaring that they would be eating Chinese and watching the Lord of the Rings. Tony had a weird kid – what six-year-old wanted orcs instead of mermaids or talking lions?)

And so there they were, sprawled across every livable surface in the communal living room, filling up each couch and most of the floor as well. Morgan was sitting on a small loveseat off to one side, her mom in front of her scooping out veggie fried rice onto her plate, when they were interrupted.

"That's Uncle Steve's seat," Morgan's declaration startled Pepper, and she looked over to see Nate attempting to climb onto the loveseat next to the girl.

She opened her mouth to tell Morgan that they would set another place aside for Uncle Steve and to let Nate sit there, but then closed it immediately when the boy just shrugged and abandoned his attempt, moving around Pepper's back so that he could sit on Morgan's other side. Morgan grinned and shifted slightly so that there was enough room for both of them, and Pepper smiled. She set the takeout carton aside and turned around to sit on the floor against the couch, her own plate in her lap.

Around the room, heroes were watching the exchange with interest, but most of them had had dinner with the Starks enough to know by this point that this was their own special routine, and nobody commented. Laura raised an eyebrow from her position next to Clint, but there was also more than a hint of pride in the expression for her son's seeming unconditional acceptance. Clint grasped her hand tightly, and they all turned to the eighty-inch television screen in front of them, as Galadriel's voiceover began to play.

Tony joined Pepper on the floor by their daughter, and the two of them, being the closest to the two youngest members of the extended family, were the only ones to hear their soft conversation over the sound of swords clashing and hobbits celebrating.

"Who's Uncle Steve?" Nate asked curiously, digging into his egg roll with relish.

Morgan smiled back. "Daddy says he's my special guardian angel. Uncle Steve brought daddy back to me. Uncle Bucky says it's because he loved me too much to let it go. I'm not sure what that means, but we set a place for him at the table every night so that he knows he's still part of our family even if we can't see him anymore. He always sits next to me."

Pepper glanced at Tony and reached out to grasp his hand tightly when she saw the way he looked down, grief clouding his gaze. One ear was still trained on the conversation happening above her head though, ready to intervene if Nate said anything to upset Morgan. She knew that Clint and Laura had raised wonderful children, but kids at that age weren't always the most sensitive.

She was surprised then, when Nate stayed silent, appearing to consider what his new friend was saying. After a minute, the four-year-old set down his egg roll and grabbed Morgan's left hand in a greasy embrace. "That's cool. Good thing everyone has two sides, right? I can sit over here."

Morgan beamed, and on the floor below her, Pepper did as well. Even Tony cracked a small smile.

Nate tilted his head to one side. "Can he be my Uncle Steve too?"

"He was your Uncle Steve, kiddo," Clint popped up behind the loveseat, startling everyone in the corner who hadn't realized that the marksman had come over to join them. "You were too young to remember, but he stayed with us a few times, years ago. I'm sorry you'll never get to really know him bud, but he was definitely your Uncle Steve."

"He stayed with you?" Tony asked, turning in his seat and raising an inquisitive eyebrow.

Clint shrugged. "Yeah, he needed a place to crash a sometimes while on the run. They didn't spend all their time together, you know, Sam and Nat split off every now and then too, and Steve would stop by to say hi. Sometimes they came with him, but not always. He was surprisingly good with kids and scary wives who don't take crap from anybody." He grinned at Laura who casually flipped him off, showing that she was also paying attention to the side conversation.

Tony shook his head. "I'm just going to skate over the fact that you had several known fugitives staying with you while you were under house arrest."

"And who's fault was all that?" Laura called out, gaze still focused on the television. Several people turned their way since her question was far louder than the rest of the conversation, but after no explanation was forthcoming, they went back to the movie.

Tony winced and wisely decided not to comment.

Nate looked up at his dad, eyes wide with this new knowledge. Morgan leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. When he looked at her, confused, she smiled. "Since you don't remember Uncle Steve loving you, I wanted to pass that along from him. And if you ever need an Uncle Steve hug, you can go to Uncle Bucky. He says it's his job now to make sure I know how much Uncle Steve loves me, so he can do that for you, too."

From the other side of the room, Bucky turned his gaze towards the kids in the corner, showing that his version of the super soldier serum also included enhanced hearing (not as good as Steve's had been, but he could easily hear a quiet conversation from a few couches away). Seeing both kids staring at him, he offered them a smile and a nod.

The level of cuteness was reaching epic proportions. Rather than burst into ugly tears in the middle of a crowded living room, Tony and Clint decided to return to their respective wives and focus on the movie instead.

Pepper did make sure to take several pictures though – for posterity. A profile of Tony with tears running down his cheeks stayed taped to the inside of the drawer in her nightstand for years. And Morgan and Nate cuddled together on the loveseat, squashed into one half so that the other side could remain empty for Uncle Steve, was framed and hung proudly on the living room wall in the Stark Tower penthouse by the end of the next week (with copies sent to Laura and Clint, of course, who promptly put it up front and center on the mantle in their farmhouse).

**XXX**

It came as a surprise to exactly no one when Nathaniel Barton and Morgan Stark started officially dating at fourteen and fifteen. There was a minor debate over whether their couple name should be Starton or Morganiel, before Morgan and Nate shut all the parents down with a half-baked threat involving arrows in uncomfortable places and laser death rays that made them all regret teaching the kids their superhero ways.

Tony had tried to get them to agree to Bark, but Morgan just leveled a glare at her father that was so _Steve_, the aging superhero was struck momentarily speechless.

Nate and Morgan had been close from that first meeting, and the Barton family began joining Clint, Wanda, and all the others most weekends from that moment on. Lila and Cooper were thrilled, and Nate wanted to spend all day every day with his new best friend. It soon became a challenge just to get the two kids to separate at the end of the weekend.

So yeah, completely not a surprise when Nate and Morgan were caught kissing in the kitchen by Lila nine years later, as the now twenty-four-year-old came in to get another beer. Lila and Cooper – now twenty-two – were both pretty busy in their roles as SHIELD Agents (the organization had been re-established publicly and officially shortly after Tony's return, with Maria Hill taking over since Fury didn't want to announce his status as not quite as dead as people had thought – turns out he might be the only person in their weird superhero sphere of connections that actually enjoyed retirement), but made the effort to join their superhero family at the Compound for a few days at least once a month. It became easier to do after Maria had them listed as Avengers consultants, allowing them to spend time with their extended family under the pretense of work.

Nate's pleas to his sister to keep her mouth shut fell on deaf ears as the woman immediately returned to the living room where the group was watching the original Star Wars trilogy, to announce what she had just seen.

Some good-natured ribbing followed, but no one seemed too shocked, and beyond the slight variance of father threatens new boyfriend where both Tony _and_ Clint told Nate in no uncertain terms what would happen if he broke Morgan's heart, nobody gave the couple too much grief.

Well, when Bucky returned from a mission a few days later (Maria had finally convinced him to officially join SHIELD five years earlier, rather than continue to just show up as Captain America with the rest of the Avengers whenever something big happened), he did take Nate aside and give him double the threats – one from him, and one from Steve. Nate had taken Morgan's suggestion nearly ten years earlier to heart, and Bucky had dutifully expanded his role of keeping Uncle Steve alive to include the boy as well.

And so the years continued to pass. Lila and Cooper rose quickly through the ranks at SHIELD, the Avengers continued to protect, and in time, Morgan and Nate soon graduated high school – Morgan a year earlier than her boyfriend and with half a college degree already completed as she doubled up on the classes, showing the world that she had indeed inherited her father's brains – and began thinking about their own futures. Nate was quick to follow his brother and sister to SHIELD Operations, a path Morgan eventually traced for herself as she completed two PhDs simultaneously and gained instant acceptance to the SHIELD Academy of Science and Technology. Tony very loudly lamented his daughter's decision to join the straight-laced, narrow-minded government tools, but he was secretly incredibly proud, especially since she had no intentions of staying in the lab, and even though her specialties guaranteed that she could spend her entire career in research if she wanted, she was far more interested in applied science. Morgan had built her first Iron Man suit before she had even graduated high school.

Nate proposed to his girlfriend the day she graduated from the Academy and was given her first official SHIELD Agent badge – level six, thanks to all the extracurricular projects she had worked on at the Academy and her unspoken but somewhat official role as a consultant to the Avengers just like all the other kids in the next generation (and it became official as soon as she graduated) – Cassie hadn't joined them at SHIELD, but she was currently working at Stark Industries and often assisted Tony with Avengers upgrades.

Shortly after that, Morgan and Nate moved in together, inhabiting a Stark family townhome in downtown DC after Tony refused to take no for an answer (something they were secretly grateful for – rent in DC was outrageous and being a SHIELD Agent wasn't exactly the most lucrative career). They had been best friends for so long that their progression to couple had been so natural, but this was their first time actually living together – beyond the odd weekend where one of them stayed with the other's family, or weekend getaways during college and SHIELD training.

So it startled Morgan then, when Nate called her down for dinner and she entered the dining room to see three place settings around the table. Her eyes filled with tears, and then suddenly Nate was there, hugging her reassuringly.

"Thank you," she whispered into his shoulder, and his grip tightened.

Nate grinned. "You think I'd forget Uncle Steve?" he asked rhetorically, pulling back so that he could look her in the eye, though his hands stayed locked around her shoulders. "I know some people would probably think it's a weird tradition, but I still remember you telling me that you kept this seat for Uncle Steve so that he would know he was still a part of your family." Morgan sniffed. "A lot's changed since then and we're going to be starting our own family someday, but Uncle Steve will always be a part of it. Right?"

Morgan nodded quickly, biting her lip as she glanced at the table next to them. "Do you think he's watching right now?" she asked, her voice husky as she turned back to her fiancé.

Nate raised an eyebrow, and then grinned and leaned forward to kiss her.

They didn't eat dinner that night.

**XXX**

There was an empty place setting next to the bride's seat at Table One – reserved for the wedding party – when they tied the knot a year later.

Morgan and Nate wouldn't have minded going straight to the courthouse, but they had a very large extended superfamily, and the couple knew the shit storm they would be in for if they didn't invite everyone.

The ceremony took place on the grounds of the Avengers Compound, white tents set up outside to accommodate everyone. Carol was there, taking a vacation from her space travels. The Guardians gave her a lift to Earth. They had found Gamora after a solid year of searching, and though she would never be the Gamora they had lost to Thanos on Vormir, she had soon come to see what the older her must have in this ragtag group of superheroes. Having Nebula there definitely helped ease the process. She even started to warm up to Quill. He was pretty pathetic most of the time, but she couldn't help but find him endearing after enough continued exposure. Falling into a relationship didn't come as easily the second time around, but eventually they found themselves right back where Quill and the other Gamora had been before her death.

Thor had left the Guardians years ago, returning to New Asgard in Norway where he joined Valkyrie in ruling over their people. Both Asgardians attended the wedding together, sharing a flask of Asgardian mead between them as they waited for the ceremony to begin.

Peter was there with his wife MJ, the woman rolling her eyes frequently as her husband fretted over her and her six-month baby bump. May, also invited and sitting on MJ's other side, just watched her nephew with amusement as she shared exasperated looks with her niece-in-law.

The Wakandans arrived a few days early, T'Challa and Shuri holing up with Bucky for hours to discuss new weapons and upgrade ideas for Bucky's vibranium arm. Bucky was on board with most of them, but he really didn't think he needed to have an inflatable raft built into the next version they fit him with.

Maria joined them in their discussion, claiming that as SHIELD Director she should be aware of any changes to Bucky's weaponry – and the arm definitely counted as a weapon, especially after upgrade three when Shuri added a rocket launcher and laser finger. None of them were fooled though, Bucky had been on back-to-back missions for the last six months, and this was the first opportunity Maria had had to actually spend time with her boyfriend since he had left. She didn't even care if they were technically talking about work, just that they were in the same room. Bucky and Maria had been dating for approximately seven years now, with no plans to make a trip down the aisle but it worked for them – if anyone had asked Bucky, he would have said that he could never get married without Steve as his best man. (But Maria's fierce glare whenever the subject was even tentatively broached deterred anyone from pushing the topic any further. Maria understood Bucky's pain completely – she had lost a sister when she was younger, and though the situation wasn't completely the same, she imagined it would be incredibly difficult to have to pick someone else to be her maid of honor). It didn't matter to her what labels they attached to their relationship, as long as they knew where they stood with each other.

Scott and Hope were nearly late, their original commercial flight canceled before Tony sent a quinjet to pick them up. They touched down right before the ceremony began with their young daughter Lizzie in tow. They met Cassie there, as she had come with Tony and Pepper from Manhattan. The young woman had been offered a plus one but chose to leave her new boyfriend at home for now – considering the superhero status of Cassie's extended family, she was hesitant to introduce any new romantic interests to them unless she knew it was going somewhere. So far, she hadn't felt the need with anyone. Scott and Hope had mostly retired from active hero life after Lizzie was born (unless there was a significant need), but Cassie was keeping the family tradition alive as her alter-ego Stinger when she wasn't working at SI, thanks to her very own super suit provided by her step-grandfather, Hank Pym – much to Hope and Janet's consternation. Scott was ecstatic.

Tony had sent Bruce three separate reminders of the date, just in case, as the doctor had been spending much of the last two years traveling around Asia and Northern Africa, working in smaller rural villages to provide medical care, and didn't always have the best idea of what day it actually was. He and Tony had worked out how to 'turn off' Professor Hulk a few years after Tony's return, so Bruce could be slightly less conspicuous unless Hulk was needed for some reason.

Rhodey was there too, of course, as were Happy, Wanda, Sam, Strange, and Wong – the latter two surprised to receive an invitation, but they had worked often enough with the Avengers over the years that Morgan and Nate considered them to be part of the family as well.

Other than the superhero crowd and the couple's immediate families, the rest of the guests were mostly comprised of friends from work. There were a few friends from their high school days, but SHIELD Agents were less likely to freak out over the large contingent of heroes. Several of the Avengers' identities were known to the world by now, and everybody knew who Morgan Stark's father was, but knowing was different from actually being in the presence of.

Nate had his brother Cooper as best man, while Morgan was preceded down the aisle by Lila, who had become as much her sister as Nate's, over the years.

The whole ceremony was a blur but soon enough the officiant was announcing the new Mr. and Mrs. Barton to a tent full of cheers and applause (not that Morgan intended to change her name, it would get confusing to have two Agent Bartons on the same team – she and Nate had been assigned to the same team six months earlier, and Morgan determinedly did not ask if her father had had anything to do with it, after she complained one night about how frustrating it was to constantly have missions on opposite sides of the world).

They all adjourned to the reception tent a short walk away from where the ceremony was held, and Morgan's eyes filled with tears as everyone sat down and she realized there was an extra seat at the top table. She looked questioningly at her father, but Tony shook his head as he sat down leaving the empty seat between him and Morgan, nodding at Nate, who smiled. Morgan remembered their first night in their house a year earlier and leaned over to kiss him.

"He's always here, right?" Nate whispered, and Morgan nodded.

Dinner passed easily, Tony's casual extravagance making itself known through the four-course meal and the chocolate fountain set up in each corner, and then it was time for speeches. Lila and Cooper, as maid of honor and best man, teamed up to give one together, full of sibling embarrassment and laughter.

Clint and Laura said a few words, and then Tony and Pepper – with Pepper doing the job she was quite used to by now and drawing Tony back to the topic at hand when the genius went off on a tangent.

It wasn't always customary for the bride to give a speech, but Morgan felt like she had something to say, so when her father finished his own extravagant toast full of pomp and circumstance, she stood up, fiddling with her champagne glass as she glanced at the empty place setting next to her. Looking back at Nate, she smiled. "When I was six years old, I fell in love. I know, that seems a little weird, but I vividly remember telling you not to sit in an empty seat because I was holding it for my dead uncle, and you just moved over to my other side and told me it was a good thing I had two of them." A few chuckles sounded throughout the tent. Morgan shrugged. "I know all our family has been saying they've seen this coming for years, and we liked to pretend to be annoyed by that, like they were trying to dictate our life or take credit for our decisions, but if I'm being completely honest, I'm not that surprised that they weren't. You gave me my first wedding ring, and my last," she grinned, remembering the fake wedding they had held one afternoon as children, in the playroom at the Compound while a nearly seventeen and fifteen year old Lila and Cooper had been busy aiding their father in bringing the opposing capture the flag team to its knees. Laura and Pepper, their two witnesses to that little ceremony, both laughed at the memory, and Morgan chuckled. "I'm just glad the ring is real this time."

More wedding guests laughed at that, and Morgan let them peter out before bit her lip soberly, eyes drawn to the empty seat yet again before they slid over one seat further and locked in on her father. "When I was four years old, I lost one of the people who meant the most to me in the world. A few weeks later, I suddenly had him back, but only because one of the other most important people chose to make the sacrifice play." Tony grimaced at the word choice, remembering an argument years ago where Steve told him he would never be the one to do that. He also remembered an apology days later where Steve admitted he really didn't know Tony at all and hoped he'd have a chance to get to. Tony had accepted the apology but never said anything about his own harsh words only partially fueled by Loki's scepter. Morgan smiled sadly at her father. "My dad's here today to walk me down the aisle, and I will never be able to thank Uncle Steve enough for that. I can't thank him for the last twenty-odd years where I was able to turn to my dad for advice, where he was able to help me moan and groan my way through grad school and the SHIELD Academy, and all the years we have still to come." She looked back at her husband. "He loved me enough to say goodbye, and I know he loved you too, Nate." She glanced out into the crowd and focused on one of her honorary uncles. "Thank you for keeping him alive for us Uncle Bucky."

Bucky raised his champagne glass in their direction, eyes warm with love for the two of them. There were now two people allowed to call him that; once Morgan had asked for him to love Nate for Uncle Steve as well, he knew he was a goner. Nate smiled at Bucky and then reached up to grasp his wife's hand reassuringly.

Morgan took a deep breath and raised her glass. Around the tent, everyone else mirrored her. "I want to thank you all for coming today, I'm so grateful that we have such an amazing family. Even though they aren't all physically here, we've had a lot of support and help to get us to where we are today, and I am so excited to see where the future takes us."

As a group, they all took a sip from their glasses. Tony stood up as Morgan turned to him, and they embraced tightly. "Love you three thousand, Maguna," he murmured in her ear.

Morgan let out a weak chuckle through her tears. "Love you three thousand and five," she whispered back.

Tony chuckled too. "Uncle Steve would be so proud of you."

Morgan pulled away and sniffed, smiling. "You too."

Tony hoped so. It would have been so easy to fall back into the cycle of alcohol and poor life choices, but he had made a promise to Pepper, and to Steve even if the asshole was no longer physically around, that he wouldn't let that happen. He had worked so hard over the last couple of decades to be the father and husband that Morgan and Pepper deserved, and superhero the world needed, both through Stark Industries and as the leader of the Avengers.

Once Morgan sat back down, it was the groom's turn. Nate stood up and rested a hand gently on Morgan's shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. "I'm not sure what else I can say that my wife hasn't already, but then we all know she's the brains of this operation," everyone laughed, and Nate grinned self-deprecatingly. "We really are so grateful for having such a close extended family, no matter how much we whined about it at the time." More laughter, and Nate turned back to his wife. "This is the part where I'm supposed to wax poetic about how amazing this woman is, but you don't really need to hear it any more – you've probably gotten enough over the last fifteen or twenty years." He shrugged, still grinning, and Morgan rolled her eyes. It was true though, they had been best friends for most of their lives, and Nate had definitely talked more than one wedding guest's ear off over how much he loved his wife, even before they were officially together (Cooper had been particularly sick of it by the time Lila had announced to the entire family that she had finally caught the two in the act during that movie night at the Compound all those years ago).

"So instead I'll just keep it to thanks." He looked at Tony and Pepper. "Thanks for trusting me with your daughter," he glanced over at his own parents, "You guys too." Clint smirked, and Laura shook her head, cuffing her husband lightly on the shoulder. He looked back over the crowd of guests. "Thank you to everyone who became part of this family, whether by choice or because we picked you up and dragged you along for the ride." There were more than a few superheroes in the crowd who smiled broadly, knowing they were part of the latter. Nate looked back at Morgan. "And a special thanks to Uncle Steve, who helped us become the people we are today, even if he wasn't there physically."

Nate took a deep breath, raising his glass. "Here's to our family: the ones we've had all along, the new ones we've welcomed along the way, the ones we still have to meet, and the ones we'll never forget, who are no longer here with us." He glanced at the empty chair next to Tony. "Uncle Steve, Auntie Nat, I wish you could be here in person, but I hope you're up there somewhere watching, and I hope you know how much we love you." He took a drink, and the rest of the group followed along, though there were a few sniffles in the crowd that weren't quite masked by the sound of glasses clinking.

The evening moved on, plates cleared and people began to make their way onto the dance floor (or to the chocolate fountains). It was much later in the night, the band beginning to wrap up and people heading inside for the night if they were staying (most of the superhero crowd) or towards the line of quinjets parked on the other side of the Compound (for those agents who needed to get back to work at their various stations around the world).

Nate and Morgan were still on the dance floor, wrapped in each other's arms as the band played the last song of the night. "So was this everything you'd hoped for?" Nate murmured quietly as they swayed to the music.

Morgan smiled softly and pulled her head back so that she could look her husband in the eye. "It was wonderful, Nate. There's only one thing that could have made it better, but I know he was here in spirit. This was perfect."

Nate sighed sadly. In a perfect world, Morgan would have had her father and her uncle here tonight. In a perfect world, none of them would have to know the pain that came with losing someone they loved. He wished he could give her that.

Morgan shook her head, seeing the flash of guilt in his eyes. "Like you said, he's always here. We were surrounded by our family tonight, Nate, even those who are no longer physically present. And just because we can't see them anymore doesn't mean they don't stay with us. Right?"

Nate smiled reassuringly and nodded. "Right."

Morgan had told all the wedding guests just a few hours earlier how grateful she was that she had had her father to live life with all her childhood, and how much she appreciated all the things they were going to experience together. It had been the one true dark cloud over her past, that she and Uncle Steve would never get to have those moments, but he was always with her, in every decision she made, every moment she got to turn to her father for advice or to share in a new memory.

It wasn't fair, but then life never was, and it wasn't supposed to be. Life was supposed to be lived: good or bad, exhilarating or excruciating, it didn't have feelings or emotions. Life is what you make of it.

And for Morgan, wrapped in her husband's loving embrace, surrounded by family both of blood and choice, she knew she had made a pretty good one.

_I always set out to make these things much shorter than they end up being. But then, I did just try to cram about twenty years into one short story. I hope it wasn't too jumpy._

_Some more notes to consider: I sometimes reference Agents of SHIELD in these stories, but it's hard to fit some of that in, especially considering how season five ended. Even the show didn't really know how to fit in with the movie timeline (I mean they literally had to go to outer space in the future during season five, to avoid making any gaffes that would screw up Infinity War/Endgame). So if you do watch Agents of SHIELD and have questions about certain things (making Maria Director, for example), we're going to say that parts of the season five finale took place in my universe – so Coulson went to Tahiti with May to live out his last days, but instead of Mack becoming Director, it's Maria. Also, Fitz totally didn't die._

_I totally imagine FitzSimmons taking Morgan under their wing and becoming mentors to her, so they were definitely at the wedding, even if I didn't name them – thought it might be weird since they haven't shown up anywhere else._

_I kind of want to hate myself a little bit for putting Hill and Bucky together, but I also wanted to give them a happy ending and they could totally be a kickass power house couple :) (Also, I think Maria Hill is seriously one of the most undervalued characters in the MCU)._


End file.
